Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Friday, December 21, 2012

Saturday Morning with Kim Hill: 22 December 2012

8:15
Stephen Epstein: South Korea

8:30 Daniel
Klein: philosophy and ageing

9:05 Jo
Morgan: adventure and philanthropy

9:40
Seasick Steve: living the blues

10:05
Playing Favourites with Tama Waipara, Joe Lindsay, Iain Gordon

11:05 Kate
De Goldi and Laura Kroetsch: books in 2012

Producer: Mark
Cubey

Wellington
engineer: Shaun Wilson

Auckland
engineer: Ian Gordon

This is the
last live Saturday Morning programme for 2012. Summer Selections from Saturday
Morning will be broadcast on the following four Saturdays (29 December, 5, 12
and 19 January), from 8:00 through midday.

Dr Stephen
Epstein is Programme Director of Asian Studies in the School of Languages and
Cultures at Victoria University of Wellington, and is researching how
information and communication technologies, travel and migration are reshaping
national identity in South Korea.

Septuagenarian
philosopher Daniel Klein is co-author of the bestselling 2007 book, Plato
and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, and
wrote the new book, Travels with Epicurus: a Journey to a Greek Island in
Search of a Fulfilled Life (Text Publishing, ISBN: 978-1922079695).

9.05 Jo
Morgan

Jo Morgan
is a mountaineer and motorcyclist, and has been a UNICEF NZ Ambassador since
2007. She is a trustee of The Morgan Foundation, a charitable trust focused on
improving the lives of the poorest people in the world.

Steven Gene
Wold, commonly known as Seasick Steve, is an American blues musician who plays
personalised guitars. He has been a hobo, a tramp, a bum, a busker and
itinerant musician, before breaking into mainstream success in his sixties and
releasing five albums since 2004. He is visiting New Zealand for the first
time, playing a concert at the Mangawhai Tavern (29 December), and the
Coromandel Gold Festival on New Years Eve.

Tama
Waipara (Rongowhakaata/ Ngati Ruapani/ Ngati Porou) is a composer and
performer, and Programme Manager, Maori & Pacific programmes, for the 2013
Auckland Arts Festival. He is executive producer for the festival show,
Everything is Ka Pai, a one-off concert he conceived in which classic Māori
songs are performed by New Zealand contemporary musicians with house band The
Yoots (16 March, Auckland Town Hall). The Yoots are a 12-piece band formed in
2006 by Fat Freddy’s Drop trombonist Joe 'Hopepa' Lindsay to put a calypso-ska
spin on classic Māori waiata, with members including Iain 'Lord Lichfeild'
Gordon on piano. The Yoots will perform at WOMAD (15-17 March), with the
Aotearoa National Maori Choir (Te Roopu Waiata Maori o Aotearoa).

Kate De
Goldi is the author of award-winning book The 10PM Question, and this year
published The ACB with Honora Lee (Longacre, ISBN: 978-1-86979-989-2). Laura
Kroetsch is the director of Adelaide Writers’ Week at the Adelaide Festival
(2-18 March 2013). They discuss the year in publishing and their books of 2012
(details of books mentioned are listed on our website page).

The News
From Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story (Knopf, ISBN: 9780307958884),
short stories by Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index: Putting My
Father’s Death in Order (Houghton Mifflin, ISBN: 9780156033800).

Better
Living Through Plastic Explosives (Pintail, ISBN: 9780670066926), short stories
by Zsuzsi Gartner, author of All the Anxious Girls on Earth (Bantam, ISBN:
780385499118).

Laura’s “To
Read” list

Far from
the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon
(Scribner, ISBN: 9780743236713), author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of
Depression (Penguin, ISBN: 9780684854670).

Waiting for
the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, essays by Daniel
Mendelsohn (New York Review of Books, ISBN: 9781590176078).

Kate’s
books for 2012

Unapologetic:
Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense
(Faber, ISBN: 9780571225217), by Francis Spufford, author of I May Be Some
Time: Ice and the English Imagination, The Child That Books Built, Backroom
Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin, and Red Plenty.

On Saturday
22 December 2012 during Great Encounters between 6:06pm and 7:00pm on Radio New
Zealand National, you can hear a repeat broadcast of Kim Hill’s interview from
15 December with Paul Wah.

Preview:
Saturday 29 December

Next week
is the first of four programmes of Summer Selections from Saturday Morning,
featuring repeats of popular interviews. In the first programme, Kim Hill’s
guests include repeats of interviews with John Lanchester, Teju Cole, Damon
Salesa, Nigel Beckford, and Nick Lowe.

Full details
of all our summer programming will be found on our website page from 28
December.